If you want the stats, it’s all available on the web or you can read Sen’s book “Development as Freedom”. He has a particular liking for Kerala for a number of reasons – high literacy rate, good health care services, low population growth, and relatively good communal harmony – all of which sets it apart from other states, particularly north Indian states, and on par with developed countries.

The main problem with Kerala is that it is very dependent on remittances from overseas to support its economy. Industrial strikes bring the state to a grinding halt on frequent basis. In terms of economic growth, it is a laggard compared to other south Indian states. However, the Kerala model shows what can be achieved in terms of health care and education without significant government funds.

The economic policies followed by BJP state govts like Modi in Gujarat indicate that it still adheres to the estbalished approach of placing too much emphasis on aggregate growth rates without paying much attention to the composition and distribution of this growth.

Even Advani of the BJP gets it.

Heck, even Hitler gets it at this point.

Even Advani of the BJP gets it.

Advani is an opportunistic joker. His opinions all seem to flow from only one logic: whatever the Congress says, say the opposite. This is after all the man and the supposedly modernizing party that opposed the nuclear party even when the Congress wanted it, essentially aligning with the far left and the regressive communist parties. And this is the man who was deputy pm during the time the bjp’s economic expansion left behind large swaths of india, and now he’s talking about broad based development?

http://www.rediff.com/money/2009/feb/12bcrisis-india-needs-swadeshi-boom-advani.htm

In recent years, many greed-driven financial instruments came into vogue. Such undependable devices of the free market economy cannot be the basis for building a truly prosperous nation. They have caused meltdown of the financial system in America and other western economies…………the past decade has demonstrated that the growth that unfettered capitalism produces usually culminates in a bubble. However, when the bubble bursts, the pain and havoc it causes has uneven impact on different sections of society.

in the past nearly two decades, India has swung to the other extreme by trying to imitate the American model of free-market capitalism. As a result, agriculture, the informal sector and labour-intensive manufacturing sectors of the economy, which create maximum employment and self-employment opportunities, have suffered prolonged and systemic neglect. The shame of thousands of farmers committing suicide that we experience today is a direct result of the new imbalance created since liberalization and globalisation. The rich-poor and urban-rural divide has become wider than ever before in the past two decades. This has given rise to many undesirable consequences…………the Bharatiya Janata Party is committed to addressing this dangerous imbalance. We believe that the new as well as the entrenched developmental challenges before India cannot be met by carrying the influence of either free-for-all capitalism or freedom-killing communism………… The world rejected communism emphatically. Now the ravages of unbridled capitalism have come to the fore, forcing even America and other western countries to rethink their development philosophies

Amartya Sen’s essay is a keeper. Money quote from the Nobel Laureate to bash Reagan/Limbaugh Republicans with:

The moral and legal obligations and responsibilities associated with transactions have in recent years become much harder to trace, thanks to the rapid development of secondary markets involving derivatives and other financial instruments. A subprime lender who misleads a borrower into taking unwise risks can now pass off the financial assets to third parties—who are remote from the original transaction. Accountability has been badly undermined, and the need for supervision and regulation has become much stronger. And yet the supervisory role of government in the United States in particular has been, over the same period, sharply curtailed, fed by an increasing belief in the self-regulatory nature of the market economy. Precisely as the need for state surveillance grew, the needed supervision shrank. There was, as a result, a disaster waiting to happen, which did eventually happen last year, and this has certainly contributed a great deal to the financial crisis that is plaguing the world today. The insufficient regulation of financial activities has implications not only for illegitimate practices, but also for a tendency toward overspeculation that, as Adam Smith argued, tends to grip many human beings in their breathless search for profits.

That would be good especially since investment in children probably has the most impact on poverty reduction and income mobility over the long-term. The problem is though what would you do with the farmers and agricultural labourers who lose their livelihoods as a result; farming is in crisis already and shedding workers, and the other main value-added sectors of the economy can’t absorb more than a fraction of new entrants into the job market due to the skills barriers. This is why so many urban migrants get shoved into the unorganised sector or go into low-paid, low-skill jobs with little change of promotion and insecure tenure. We didn’t learn China and East Asia’s trick of creating large demand for unskilled labour in labour-intensive industries unfortunately.